Welcome to Monday, February 9, 2026, and National Bagel and Lox Day, one of the few ways I’ll eat fish. I don’t know who got the idea to put salmon on a bagel with cream cheese, but the idea was, as the kids say, “genius”. Below is a a photo from the Wikipedia “Bagel and cream cheese” page. First, some history:
In American Jewish cuisine, cream cheese toppings (colloquially called “schmear“) of bagels have particular names. For example, a bagel covered with spread cream cheese is sometimes called a “whole schmear” bagel. A “slab” is a bagel topped with an unspread slab of cream cheese. A “lox and a schmear” is a bagel with cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon. Tomato, red onion, capers and chopped hard-boiled egg are often added. These terms are used at some delicatessens in New York City, particularly at Jewish delicatessens and older, more traditional delicatessens.
The lox and schmear likely originated in New York City around the time of the turn of the 20th century, when street vendors in the city sold salt-cured belly lox from pushcarts. A high amount of salt in the fish necessitated the addition of bread and cheese to offset the lox’s saltiness.It was reported by U.S. newspapers in the early 1940s that bagels and lox were sold by delicatessens in New York City as a “Sunday morning treat”, and in the early 1950s, bagels and cream cheese combination were very popular in the United States, having permeated American culture.
Jewish cuisine is pretty dire as ethnic cuisines go, but a bagel with lox and a schmear is surely its glory and apotheosis:
And the ducks will arrive in March—if we get any ducks this year.
It’s also Chocolate Day, National Poop Day (the day when the digested food from watching the Super Bowl is excreted), Oatmeal Monday, and Pizza Pie Day.
There’s a Google Doodle honoring ice skating in the Olympics (they change the sport every day or so). Click below to go to the AI site explaining figure skating:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Sports: The Seattle Seahawks crushed the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 (or LX, as they say), with the final score 29-13. I watched about five minutes and read the Italian novel The Leopard instead, as I wanted to finish it last night. It was superb and I recommend it very highly. All the news about the Super Bowl appears to be Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and I still don’t know who Bad Bunny is, clearly showing that I am ignorant of modern music.
*The NYT reveals that the Epstein files show a closer connection between Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein than we thought: Epstein’s companion and fellow predator Ghislaine Maxwell was closely connected with Clinton as he founded his Global Initiative, and Epstein may even have funded it (article archived here).
Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in supporting the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of President Bill Clinton’s signature post-White House endeavors, new documents released by the Justice Department show.
Ms. Maxwell took part in budget discussions related to the first Clinton Global Initiative conference; talked through challenges about it with both Clinton aides and Publicis Groupe, the company that produced the inaugural event; and arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project,” according to emails in the massive cache of documents collected as part of the government’s investigations of Mr. Epstein.
The source of the money is unclear, including whether Mr. Epstein provided the funds. However, the emails show that he was aware of the payment.
“Ask him to tell you why i million now and where will it be going,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Ms. Maxwell a few days after she received the wiring instructions from Publicis.
Ms. Maxwell’s involvement in the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative took place in 2004, before Mr. Epstein’s 2006 indictment and 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution with a minor, and long before Ms. Maxwell, a daughter of the media baron Robert Maxwell, was sentenced in 2022 to two decades in prison for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls.
The emails support an assertion Ms. Maxwell made last year in an interview with the Justice Department that she played a key role in helping set up the global conference.
Mr. Clinton has said he stopped speaking with Mr. Epstein sometime before his 2006 indictment. In a statement, Angel Ureña, a spokesman for the Clintons, said the former president had “called for the full release of the Epstein files” and “has nothing to hide.”
Again, there’s no evidence so far that Clinton participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and this was all before Epstein had been convicted for the first time. Nevertheless, there are allegations that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, and the ex-President (and Hillary) also refused to testify before Congress, though I think they’ve since agreed to do so. What can I say?—news is scant and papers are touting associations like this that may well turn out to be nothing.
*Iran has sentenced its imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to an additional long stretch in prison—because she went on a hunger strike. It is, of course, Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned several times for criticizing the theocratic government, and awarded the Prize in 2023.
Iran has sentenced the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to more than seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, her supporters said Sunday, as Tehran cracks down on all dissent following nationwide protests and the deaths of thousands at the hands of security forces.
The new convictions against Mohammadi come as Iran tries to negotiate with the US over its nuclear programme to avert a military strike threatened by Donald Trump. Iran’s top diplomat said on Sunday that Tehran’s strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers”, striking a maximalist position just after negotiations in Oman with the US.
Mohammadi’s supporters cited her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who had spoken to her. Nili confirmed the sentence on X, saying it had been handed down on Saturday by a court in the city of Mashhad.
“She has been sentenced to six years in prison for ‘gathering and collusion’ and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban,” he wrote. Mohammadi had received another two years of internal exile to the city of Khosf, about 740km (460 miles) south-east of the capital, Tehran, the lawyer added.
Iran did not immediately acknowledge the sentence.
Supporters say Mohammadi has been on a hunger strike since 2 Februrary. She had been arrested in December at a memorial ceremony honouring Khosrow Alikordi, a 46-year-old Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate who had been based in Mashhad. Footage from the demonstration showed her shouting, demanding justice for Alikordi and others.
Supporters had warned for months before her December arrest that Mohammadi, 53, was at risk of being put back into prison after she received a furlough in December 2024 over medical concerns. While that was to be only three weeks, her time out of prison lengthened, possibly as activists and western powers pushed Iran to keep her free. She remained out even during the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel.
Mohammadi has had multiple heart attacks, convulsions, and surgery for what might have been bone cancer. But she has a Nobel Prize, and is serving time as a political prisoner. Iran should let her go, preferably overseas where she can get decent medical care. I don’t know if, were she released, she would want to stay in Iran, but she will likely die in prison if they don’t let her go soon.
*There’s a news hiatus because of the Superbowl, which gives me a chance to catch up on non-“news” article, like this one in The Dispatch, “Why I don’t regret majoring in the humanities.” by Sharla Moody (archived here). I read it because I’ve recently been pondering the differences between sciences and humanities, and have defended the latter even though I am (or was) a scientist.
I majored in English, which baffled many of my friends and, I think, worried my parents. Sometimes, when I’m confronted by the salaries of first-year software engineers and the technical training that such salaries require, I worry I made a mistake.
But I remember, too, the first time I read Paradise Lost and felt that there might be more to the world than I knew. I had always considered myself a bookworm, but it wasn’t until I enrolled in my major that I learned that reading the right books, and reading them with other people, was a different experience altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about the problem of evil, or wondered about the existence of fate, before reading Paradise Lost. But reading John Milton gave these questions force and meaning to a degree that nothing prior had. If angels made by God to live in heaven couldn’t resist temptation, what hope was there for me to try to live according to my own values? In other classes, I learned statistical modeling and facts about recent American foreign policy. But nothing gave my life more urgency than the questions that I found in literature. Studying the humanities, for me, was like replacing a too-dim lightbulb. Suddenly I became aware of what was, and always had been, around me. There is so much to the world that I didn’t (and still don’t) know, and before I began studying the humanities, I had no idea that there was so much I was ignorant of.
Much has been made recently about the decline in reading among young people, especially those enrolled at elite universities known for rigorous humanities programs. Professors fret over declining enrollments. While smaller liberal arts colleges shutter, state flagships cut programs, and elite schools reduce Ph.D. admissions and consolidate departments.
While some of this is the result of decades of academic overproduction, practical degree programs absorbing the time of students, and yes, the Internet-phones-AI tripartite, the crisis of the humanities also comes from a lack of clear understanding of what the humanities are for. So argues Humanistic Judgment: Ten Experiments in Reading, a new book published by Yale University Press. Edited by Benjamin Barasch, David Bromwich, and Bryan Garsten—the latter two are Yale professors—the essay collection examines the current state of the humanities.
In recent decades, Bromwich argues in his introduction to the book, the academy has become less focused on understanding the goal of humanistic study as the cultivation of judgment or the development of self-knowledge or even inquiry into the nature of reality and humanity and the world, but rather focused on understanding texts through the lenses of cultural and political debates.. . .
. . .Humanistic study in the Western tradition has long been taught in seminar-style dialogues, taking after Socrates. Scholars commonly refer to works as “in conversation with one another.” At the center of the liberal arts lies this precept that education cannot be a solitary project. In reading and conversing and debating, the student of the humanities is, ideally, always exposed to one who experiences a text, or a painting, or the world differently. Just as reading might expose one’s ignorance, so too might the classroom. But this humility, in turn, should always lead to a desire to understand reality more deeply. In this vein, Barasch, in his contribution to the essay collection, discusses the work of journalist James Agee, writing, “Agee’s radical humanism is a craving for reality, a desire to live in the world as it is, and as he is. In becoming real to himself he discovers again and again the separateness, and thus the reality, of others.”
The sciences, social sciences, and technical fields are noble, good pursuits. But we do a disservice to young people when we discourage them from pursuing the liberal arts and treat education as the mere acquisition of skills and knowledge. To withstand the challenges posed by scientism and politics and AI and declines in reading, the humanities need positive accounts of their value. They have an excellent one in Humanistic Judgment.
I don’t like the “scientism” bit nor the implication that the humanities helps us “understand reality more deeply” unless that means “subjective reality” or “the fact that different people have different viewpoints.” But, as I said in my Quillette piece, the arts (I’m excluding quasi-scientific humanities fields like economics and sociology), the value of the humanities is to apprehend the diversity of viewpoints of others, and to expand our understanding of how other people view the world.
*I was pulling for Lindsay Vonn to get an Olympic medal in downhill skiing. It was less than two weeks ago that she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, a ligament that stabilizes the knee. You’d think that that would end her plans to ski, but this is one tough woman, and although she’s 41, she was bent not just on competing, but on winning. All that came to a grim end when she crashed painfully in yesterday’s competition. The latest report is that she broke her left leg and underwent surgery to stabilize it.
Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of a downhill medal in her fifth Olympic Games ended violently Sunday morning here with a gruesome crash that left her screaming in pain and being airlifted from the mountain.
But with teammate Breezy Johnson, who won gold in the event, waiting at the bottom, Vonn — who was third fastest in Saturday’s final training run — barely got to evaluate herself against the competition before disaster struck. Thirteen seconds into a run that would have taken more than a minute and a half, she clipped the fourth gate with her right arm.
The contact sent Vonn spinning, with snow flying around her. Her head and shoulder violently drove into the surface of the course before she flipped again, her legs splayed.Various broadcasts captured audio of Vonn crying, “Oh my God!” The crash occurred at noon local time, and it took just nine minutes for a helicopter to arrive to begin the process of flying her from the mountain.
“Certainly hoping she is okay after that terrible crash,” the public address announcer belted to a once buoyant crowd that had grown essentially silent.
. . . In a World Cup career that extends back more than two decades — and includes 84 victories and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill in 2010 — Vonn has been injured countless times. Never, though, in this kind of spotlight.
Her comeback bid that began last season — after the knee replacement allowed her to ski without pain for the first time she could remember — had been enormously successful. She won two World Cup downhill races this season, was the leader in the standings and had not finished out of the top three in five downhill starts. This comeback wasn’t a lark. This comeback was legit.
It’s sad, but you have to give her credit; she knew the danger and skied anyway. And after a knee replacement some time ago! She’ll be ok financially, and she had her medals. I doubt she’ll be back at 45 for the next Olympics, but you have to give her kudos for courage and diligence. Here’s a video of her accident (click on “Watch on YouTube” or here.
*The next movie I’d like to see is “The Testament of Ann Lee“, starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role. It’s about the woman who founded the Shakers in England and their migration to America; it’s also a musical. It’s been highly rated, and there’s buzz about Oscars for both the movie and Seyfried. David French gives his approving take in the NYT, characterizing it as “A movie about American that broke my heart” (the article is archived here).
I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why.
I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers, a tiny utopian Christian sect that started in England in the mid-18th century. Lee brought a small band of followers to the United States shortly before the Revolution.
The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture. Shakers committed themselves to excellence in all things, and their craftsmanship was impeccable.
I’m not exactly the target audience for a film about chair-making religious extremists. I’m more the kind of moviegoer who’s drawn to Will Ferrell or light sabers or dragons. Also orcs. I find great meaning in superhero movies. But my wife and son were going, and I wanted to hang out with them.
So I went, a bit skeptically, hoping that perhaps I might get to see a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” But then the movie started, and it broke my heart.
. . .In Ann Lee’s case, her radical faith, which mirrored Christ’s and the Apostle Paul’s commitment to singleness and celibacy, also manifested itself in radical love, both for people inside her community and outside it.
In essence, Lee and her followers turned to God and said — as so many believers have — I will do anything for you. And they heard God’s ancient answer to that declaration: Love thy neighbor. And your neighbor includes the enslaved Black man, and the white indentured servant who possessed so few rights, and the Native American who was slowly but surely being driven from his land.
Hours after the movie, I finally realized why I had tears in my eyes. In the final scene, you see Lee’s plain wooden casket sitting alone under a painting of a beautiful tree.
In that moment, you could clearly see the gap between American hope and American reality. And I was reminded once again of one of George Washington’s favorite Bible verses, Micah 4:4 — “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” In his writings, Washington referred to it almost 50 times.
. . .And so it is with this nation we love. In 250 years, the already of American liberty has expanded. We are a better and more decent nation than the one Ann Lee encountered. But as we see state brutality and state violence spill out across our streets, we know that we are not yet fulfilling the promise of the declaration.
Ann Lee died in 1784. When she was reportedly reinterred in the 1820s, she was found to have a fractured skull. It’s 2026 now, and we still see beatings in the streets. There are still too many caskets under the tree of liberty. But the tree is still alive, and it continues to grow. May we all sit securely in its shade one day.
It looks like the movie broke his heart because it reminded him of Trump’s America. That is a stretch at best. I will see the movie, but won’t go to it looking for analogies between 18th century America and today’s America. I will go to learn a bit about history (the Shakers were celibate, so could grow only through converts) and to admire the artistry.
Here’s the official trailer:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two downstairs cats affirm their pledge:
Szaron: Between us, veganism is not my option.
Hili: Not mine either.
In Polish:
Szaron: Między nami mówiąc, weganizm nie jest moją opcją.
Hili: Moją też nie.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day:
From The Language Nerds:
From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
From Masih; the mothers of murdered protestors console each other:
A mother of a sports champion killed in the recent uprising stood at the grave of another grieving mother and held her hands, saying: “Your child is not alone.”
Immediately, other mothers began shouting their children’s names, names the Islamic Republic wants erased.
This is… pic.twitter.com/H8gh2qOLD1
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 8, 2026
From Bryan, a long (8-min) clip of Peter Boghossian practicing “street epistemology”. Peter is damned by progressives, but as you see he’s really good at practicing the Socratic method on ignorant youth (and oy! is this youth ignorant!):
@peterboghossian encountered one of the most brainwashed students ever captured on camera. This perfectly illustrates the problem at the center of all of this pic.twitter.com/nr9V5bCyVt
— Warren Smith (@WTSmith17) February 7, 2026
From Luana: apparently antivaxers are not limited to the U.S., and these data are genuine.
Now do Canada. pic.twitter.com/faUPLEOUg5
— Daniel Boshears (@BoshearsDaniel) February 7, 2026
From Simon; Jock the Chartwell cat:
Well done Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/AeDsYVh2GM
— dominic dyer (@domdyer70) February 4, 2026
From Gerald Steinberg, President of NGO Monitor. I stopped donations to MSF years ago.
Here’s me in the famous @MSF Doctors Without Borders T shirt, back in 2010
I proudly worked for them
They haven’t posted a single word on the disappearance of Iranian doctors who helped injured protestors
I will never work with them or donate to them again pic.twitter.com/bcpIHCwhtW
— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) February 7, 2026
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death within an hour or two after arriving at Auschwitz. He was thirteen years old. https://t.co/RqVv2CTRJj
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 9, 2026
Two from Dr. Cobb. First: Earth and Moon:
This is Earth and the Moon, photographed by a spacecraft in Mars orbit.
— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2026-02-08T02:21:22.677Z
From Matthew, a hilarious Instagram video (sound up) featuring a British t.v. presenter pretending to ask for kitschy items in a British store. Click on screenshot to watch, or go here to see the original. Ms. Welby cracks herself up.
I LOVE the Edwardian fox with a ruff and human hands who plays the cello:
A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT:9
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. -Alice Walker, poet and novelist (b. 9 Feb 1944)
So to what extent is my (yes, often Sunday) bagel w/ lox a New York City food and to what extent is it a Jewish food? Location or ethnicity? Ethnicity wins here I guess. Yum.
D.A.
NYC/CT
Yin Yang in a Yin Yang
Yin Yangs all the way down 😁
One of my son’s favorite sushi rolls is the Philly Roll with smoked salmon and cream cheese which was created based on the bagel and lox.
The smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels are the only kind of bagel I like, mostly because I like smoked salmon. The Superbowl didn’t go well for the NEs. I was watching One Battle After Another 🙂
I enjoyed that movie, watched it twice. A couple of scenes had me guffawing. I loved del Toro’s character- Sensei! I haven’t seen Penn in anything recently and though his character was a bit of a stereotype, I thought he had a great presence.
I like everything bagels topped with with salmon and cream cheese. I occasionally enjoy poppyseed bagels with the same toppings.
One Battle After Another is quite good. The car chase was excellent.
Bad Bunny’s show was hard for me to follow on TV–I wonder how it was received by the folks in the stands. I was reminded of the halftime show I have re-watched many times–the 2010 Grey cup with Bachman and Turner. Yes, I’m an old fart, but zounds! what a show!
The Leopard is indeed a wonderful book. I like to give it as a 50th birthday present.
As for Bad Bunny, I didn’t know who he was, but I watched the first bit of halftime to find out. I feel one should be able to sing without grabbing one’s crotch. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned.
The crotch-grabbing was annoying, but the other dancers were excellent. Not really my thing but a lot better than other stuff I’ve seen these days.
PS sometimes I wonder if baseball pitchers can pitch without grabbing their crotches. Is that much fine-tuning necessary?😹
I always wondered why singers think it looks cool to grab their family jewels (Michael Jackson was fond of doing this). They look like little kids who have to pee.
✅
A baseball pitcher isn’t adjusting his genitals the way musicians on stage do. He’s adjusting the aluminum or dense plastic cup that all male athletes wear inside their athletic supporters. Given the intense concentration it takes to pitch, I think I’d forgive a pitcher some slack to make sure there is the necessary slack in what pinches and what doesn’t.
Of course we see the pitchers doing it because the camera focuses on them in close-up whenever they have the ball, which is most of the game!
True story:
At the beginning of my humble athletic career in Grade 9, we rookies were all sent to the local sporting goods shop to buy the necessary cup and jockstrap before our first scrimmage. With the kind of trepidation I would only feel again when I much, much later bought condoms for the first-to-twelfth times (by asking the pharmacist to produce some from behind the counter), I made my request to the salesman.
“What size do you need?”
I thought I would die with embarrassment. This was going to be even worse than I imagined! Seeing my plight, the kindly older man had mercy on me. Gently he said, “I meant, what’s your belt size, son.”
In cricket, bowlers shine their balls. Their team mates help out, of course. As a cricket ball gets old, the fielding team rubs the ball on their clothing to keep one side of the ball smooth while letting the other side roughen. The asymmetry helps the ball move sideways (in cricket it’s called swing) as it goes through the air.
I was watching a cricket match on television when the mother of a friend of mine asked me why the bowler was rubbing the ball on his crotch. I explained as best I could. They don’t always rub it on their crotches. But it is, sometimes, a good place to rub on because of its location with relation to the bowling hand.
Any genres of music that were invented after I reached the age of 30 or so are mostly inaccessible to me. I listen to Bad Bunny and I am just unmoved. It’s my loss, but that’s life.
But even if I can’t appreciate his music, I can appreciate Bad Bunny himself. I find him adorable.
As for the crotch grabbing? It is certainly jarring to a lot of older people, including moi, but I’d probably be inured to it by now if I had paid any attention to music produced in the last few decades, since it has been years now since Michael Jackson first popularized the move.
The young man in the Peter Boghossian video appears not to have had his opinions meaningfully tested before. It also appears, to me, that he really wants to engage in this kind of Socratic dialogue.
Maybe, as a practical matter, this kind of dialogue cannot take place in a classroom – too many students? Maybe classes he has taken so far (he mentions a class in gender studies) don’t allow unorthodox expressions of thought, and so hamper student development. I don’t know.
How many more like-thinking students are there? Lots, I bet.
The student just learned by rote to spout “systemic racism!” without the slightest understanding of what “systemic” even means. It is like those idiot students chanting “from the river to the sea” while having no idea what river and what sea the genocidal slogan refers to.
I have to take issue with your statement “Jewish cuisine is pretty dire as ethnic cuisines go.” What about latkes, brisket, kreplach, matzo ball soup, rugelach, kugel, blintzes, chopped chicken livers with schmaltz, haroseth (especially the Sephardic versions with dates), just to name a few? It’s not all about gefilte fish — although with enough horseradish, even gefilte fish can be tasty.
Yep…and corn beef (brisket) coming through the rye!
My grandmother used to make gefilte fish from scratch for the family, starting with at least two large fresh fish (I think whitefish and pike). Took up most of a day, and it was amazing. Very much unlike what you find in a jar of Manischewitz in a grocery.
My aunt who came over on the boat in 1902 made gefilte fish, usually from fresh caught striped bass (salt water rockfish) my father would bring her. I do not know why, but none of my cousins (next generation) carried on that skill….so we are reduced to the jar of Manischevitz…and, I agree, it is not even close.
I love it, but much of it will kill you if you eat too much. Lots of salt and fat, but an amazing treat once in a while.
My grandmothers and mother (still active at age 90) made kreplach (yummy fried goodness), chicken soup with kneidlach (matzo-ball soup), and other delicacies. My mother’s kneidlach were floaters; my Aunt Marion’s were sinkers.* And my mother complained that my aunt’s version was all wrong. Theirs was a continuation—in the New World—of the Old World battle between the Litvaks (the Jewish intelligentsia from Lithuania—my Aunt Marion) and the Galitzianers (the “lower class” Jews from Galicia—my mother’s family from Odessa). My wife makes all of the above, and gefilte fish, which is an acquired taste. Borscht, which my wife makes and which my maternal grandmother turned into a high art—served hot or cold—is one of my favorites.
*Whether they float or sink depends largely on how hard you squeeze the matzo meal mixture when rolling them into balls.
In my family we loved the sinkers. “Make ’em like bombs!” We would say to my mom before Pesach. My grandmother made gefilte fish too. Absolutely delicious.
To this list we must add smoked whitefish salad (does Zabar’s still do it?), stuffed kishka (only rarely available even in Jewish delicatessens), and, above all, hamentashen. I still reside in my present city because, many many years ago, a bakery there retailed hamentashen all year round.
Well, if I were naming French or Chinese dishes, I could do a lot more than that! There are high spots in Jewish cuisine, but as a secular Jew I have to say that if I could eat only one cuisine for the rest of my life, it would be Indian (North and South) Chinese, or French. And I say that sadly.
For me it would be Italian or Japanese.
Don’t forget the knishes!
Watched some puppy bowl, team figure skating (live US gold), and the excellent flyover by eight aircraft of four different types. Camera work was crappy, but they appeared to be in excellent formation and dead ontime. I liked that the F-22’s had core mission priority and were replaced by air national guard F-15’s giving the local boys and girls a nice outreach mission.
Read Matthew’s “Brain” book in the back of the house the rest of the time, somehow resisting my wife’s call at some point that baby bunny was performing. But from the comments above, it appears I made the correct decision about the rabbit.
There is a lingering question of “The System” – as Boghossian asks the interlocutor to specify. I went and listened to a good amount of the full video on YouTube. If interested, look for Peter’s channel, and title “Students try to explain why America is racist”. IMHO there are some worthwhile points by the students in the dialogue.
IMHO and attempting brevity :
“The System” the interlocutor means is right in front of our noses and his. It is nothing more than the totality of reality. Like water to a fish. So it is elusive.
But the reason this is brought into relief is Joe Kincheloe’s Critical Constructivism – the “worldview” (Kincheloe’s word, AKA Weltanschauung) which allows escape from this world of contradictions and power centers through critique in the explicitly Marxist sense – abolishing problematic systems and raising their content with whatever the Critical Theory says (abolish-and-raise is Aufheben). This is Critical Pedagogy – so, I suppose Kincheloe is a critical pedagogue (but I’m not sure the word “pedagogue” serves well here).
Critical Pedagogy – A Primer
Joe Kincheloe
Peter Lang, Inc. publishers
2005
James “Off the Rails” Lindsay goes through Kincheloe’s book sentence by sentence in three (so far) podcasts e.g.:
The Book of Woke : The Basis of Critical Constructivism
https://youtu.be/VZ7mdan2C6w?si=4h4lCC-oEUT_GGmI
Make of it what one will. IMHO Critical Constructivism – in the words of The Dude – really ties the room together, i.e. the Messy Room of Woke Toys.
Thanks for Lindsay’s podcast link on this crap, Bryan.
Bagels and lox were a mystery to me as a child in the Midwest, known only from comedians like Alan King on Ed Sullivan. My parents explained that a bagel was kind of a Jewish doughnut, and lox was salmon.
I could not imagine a worse food than fish on a doughnut.
That would be bad, particularly on a jelly donut!
Pretty much what I was imagining! The world was a much bigger place then, and in my family anything beyond meat and potatoes was exotic. Now my four-year old granddaughter likes a lox and cream cheese bagel, but it must be topped with capers. Diva.
Congrats to the Seahawks. They were great and deserved the win. Hurts a little bit as a Carolina fan (Drake Maye), but still riding high from the Duke-Carolina game Saturday.
“The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture” — I beseech that movie reviewer, in the bowels of Christ, to use the Oxford comma!
I second that notion. Also, lovely reference with the Cromwell “beseech you, in the bowels of Christ…”
Indeed!!!!
The folks who run the US Olympic team deserve plenty of grief (in my opinion). They should have kept Lindsey Vonn out of the race given her prior injuries. The ultimate decision was hers, but that doesn’t make them innocent.
Vonn earned her place on that team. Whether to compete or not was entirely her decision, as it should be. There are no bad guys here.
I agree that “Vonn earned her place on that team”. However, the folks who run the US Olympic team should have made every effort to keep her from racing. Perhaps they did, and are not talking about it now. Perhaps they put pressure on her to race, when she should not of.
It’s not uncommon for professional athletes to compete with injuries; it’s part of the world they live in. She was supported by her teammates and the IOC. As Edward said, there are no bad guys here. Highly doubt anyone put external pressure on her, at least not as much pressure as she put on herself. That’s also a part of being a professional athlete. I’m just sad it ended in such a horrible crash, she’s so fun to watch.
My take was that she should have stepped aside, after her ACL injury, to let a deserving alternate have a chance of a lifetime. She completed practice runs? I don’t know if that is anywhere near the difficulty of the actual down-hill race. If so, then I am wrong and concede she should stay in it. But if not, then this was wrong to try.
Watched the entire game, as I am a long-term resident of the Pacific Northwest, and I like both the Seahawks and the (baseball) Mariners. The game was a defensive extravaganza—well played with very few penalties.
The halftime show had some good moments—a surprise crash through the floor into a family’s living room—for instance. (How did they do that?) Bad Bunny could easily be called Big Bunny, as he is one very large man. The crotch-grabbing was tasteless, but Bad Bunny was only following in the footsteps of other crotch grabbers of note. I’d like to see a transcript of the lyrics, and I suppose I could have viewed the closed captioning in Spanish, but I didn’t want to risk missing the rest of the game in case I couldn’t press the right buttons. I had never heard of Bad Bunny until recently—in the run up to the game—and I may never see him perform again, but all in all it was a good show.
Ant then, of course, the second half started and it was back to the game.
I wish the Bad Bunny show had subtitles. I only speak food Spanish. I felt left out of the moment, even though the spectacle was enjoyable. I thought it would be a closer game, but as a Hawks fan, having little stress is always nice. The lack of penalties was remarkable. Having Walker healthy all year was an offensive ticket to our success (esp. when we had Charbonnet) but the defense got better as the year went on- a truly inspired group. Lastly, I’m glad we have a good kicker. 🙂 And kudos to Darnold for a solid game and no xovers.
Yes to all of the above! This year’s Seahawks got out ahead of their opponents game after game, much to the benefit of my blood pressure. And, as you say, Jason Myers was invaluable. He was amazing all year. Talk about pressure. During a field goal attempt, 60,000 fans in the audience and millions at home are focused on the kicker. OMG!
Yes, cool as a cucumber, that Myers.
My last comment of the day: glad for you and your Hawks last night Norman! My wife was pulling for Seattle too, but that was because she hates Kraft, the patriots’ owner…its a political thing.
Based on the stunning popularity and success of Bad Bunny, I have committed myself to self-improvement. I’m going to perform, in public, at least 200 instances per hour of crotch grabbing and 100 arched-back genital thrusts. The toughest part of my cunning plan will be to decide where to spend all the money that will come pouring in.
” . . . but Bad Bunny was only following in the footsteps of other crotch grabbers of note.”
Well, that settles it. What a Wascally Wabbit. Reminds me of the mother, in response to her children complaining because she did not let them take part in an activity their friends were taking part in: “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?”
Has Megan the Stallion been in a Super Bowl halftime show grabbing her crotch and “singing” “WAP”? If not, has she not been mistreated?
I loved the video of the women “asking” for the kitschy items in a store which obviously had oodles of them. Years ago when I was a kid in the 60’s my dad had to do some kind of business in a huge department store named Goldblatt’s (remember it?) and my little brother and I were left to our own devices. We decided to have an “ugly lamp” contest, searching eagerly through the extensive furniture department. Our finalists had us literally ROFLOL, tears in our eyes.
I still recall the winner, an unbelievably puffed, decorated, and ribbon-bestowed lampshade hanging above two large, creepy, goggled- eyed 18th century aristocrats who were made out of brightly-colored china and playing a harpsichord while singing. Even in our tasteless youth, we knew prime tacky when we saw it.
Trump would’ve loved them!
Measles: Dr. Oz apparently came out recommending vaccination yesterday.
Iranians: How many of those recently massacred would otherwise have been among those bringing their country out of its morass?
Kermit: Interesting. I don’t know what Frog is in Spanish, but in Swedish it’s Grodde (grood-eh). My daughter was stuffed-animal age when we lived in Sweden. We bought her her a stuffed frog at IKEA and named him Gustav Grodde.
The funniest thing in the Boghossian interview is that the guy misunderstands and misstates what systemic racism means according to critical race theory. He says systemic racism is when the individual people in the system are racist. However, CRT says that systemic racism means the system itself is racist even where no individuals in it are racist.
In other words, he’s a CRT true believer who flunked CRT 101. He’s also a case of someone who uses fancy-sounding words without knowing, or even having contemplated, what they mean.
Folks have been debating the value of science education vs humanities education for many years—see the excellent book by C.P Snow—The Two Cultures.
Of course I know many scientists who have given themselves an excellent education in the humanities. The Great Books (choose your own list) is no secret. Many of my scientific friends are well-read in history, philosophy, and classical literature. However, my generation is ln the verge of retirement, or already retired. With the overall decline in reading, combined with the need to read enormous amounts of scientific literature just to keep up with one’s own field, I doubt that the knowledge of humanities among scientists will continue as it has been.
And what of the knowledge of science among humanities majors? How many of our academic colleagues in the humanities have read the classics in the sciences? Begin with the Origin of Species- a Great Book by anyone’s standards.
It is a good thing that scientists write books specifically intended for the general population (Thanks again, Jerry), because without that effort, even our own colleagues in academe would remain woefully ignorant of science.
A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT:9
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. -Alice Walker, poet and novelist (b. 9 Feb 1944)